Palm for Mrs. Pollifax Read Online Free PDF Page B

dietician, a waiter, and a secretary. Tomorrow there would also be a doctor. Quickly she changed from her traveling suit to a dress and went downstairs to discover where lunch would be served, and to do a little reconnoitering before anyone else interrupted her.
    She found solariums everywhere, all of them empty at this season of anything but jungle-like rubber plants. There were two more of them on the Reception floor, as well as a pair of television rooms side by side. The dining rooms lay at the far end of the corridor—Mrs. Pollifax could see the waiters moving past glass-paneled doors. She paused at what looked to be the library and glanced in at more dark, heavy furniture and rich oak paneling.
    One piece of dark furniture was occupied by a handsome, deeply tanned young man who appeared to be examining the crease of his trouser. He glanced up and saw her, lifted an eyebrow and said, “
Bon jour, madame
, but that’s the limit of my French.”
    “It’s just about the limit of mine, too,” she admitted, and decided this was an opportunity to meet her first adult guest. She sank into another large, overstuffed chair and wondered if she would ever be able to get out of it. “You’re waiting for lunch, too?”
    “I am waiting,” he said gloomily, “for something to happen in this place. After eight days here I would consider the dropping of a spoon almost intolerable excitement.”
    Mrs. Pollifax looked at him with amusement. He just missed being impossibly handsome by a nose that had been broken and still looked a little stepped upon; she liked him the better for it because it gave humor to a face that was otherwise all tanned skin, sleepy green eyes, white teeth, and blond hair. “You do look as if you’re accustomed to a faster pace,” she admitted frankly.
    “You’re staring at my purple slacks and red shirt,” he said accusingly. “I thought—I actually believed—Montbrison might have a touch of the Casino about it. After all, it’s patronized by many of the same people, except when they come hare it’s to repair their livers. How was I to know that repairing the liver is almost a religion?”
    “I had no idea,” said Mrs. Pollifax, fascinated by the thought. “Is it?”
    “My dear lady,” he sighed, “I can only tell you that when I saw the Count Ferrari at Monaco in April he had a blonde in one hand and a pile of chips in the other. The count,” he added, “is seventy-five if he’s a day. Here at Montbrison he is suddenly mortal and positively devout about it. He carries pills. A whole
bag
full of pills. He dines across the room from me, and I swear to you he comes in every evening with a plastic bag of pills. You can see them: red, green, blue, pink.”
    Mrs. Pollifax laughed. “You’re very observant but should you talk about your friend so loudly?”
    “Oh, he’s not a
friend
, he doesn’t speak English,” the young man said dismissingly. “We only say good evening to one another. I may not be a linguist—I confess to being stuffily British in that sense—but I can say good evening in approximately fifteen languages. Rather handy, that.”
    “Unless you meet them in the morning,” she pointed out.
    He grinned. “That, my dear lady, is a season of the day I avoid at any cost.”
    “If you’re so bored—and if no one obliges yon by dropping a spoon—and since you look so extremely healthy,” she said, “Why do you stay?”
    “Because my doctor sent me here.” He hesitated and then added crisply, “I’m recovering from the Hong Kong flu, you see. And you?”
    Mrs. Pollifax also found herself hesitating and then she said without expression, “Actually I’m recovering from the Hong Kong flu, too.”
    This ought to have produced instant commiseration, a few chuckles or a lively comparing of symptoms but it brought instead a flat, curiously awkward silence. I wonder why, she thought, and tried to find something to say. “I hear it was a particularly virulent strain